The hidden foundation
Beneath one of the most photographed buildings in Paris is a forest nobody sees. It is a good way to think about trust.
4 June 2026 · 3 min read
At ChangeNOW this year, surrounded by the iron and glass of the Grand Palais, we kept coming back to something hidden under our feet. The building is held up by roughly 3,400 oak piles driven into the wet Parisian ground — the equivalent of a small forest, more than thirty hectares of timber, buried where no visitor will ever see it.
We turned it into a small piece of art for our booth. But the idea stuck with us, because it is exactly how trust works in a carbon market.
A forest under Paris
When the Grand Palais was built for the 1900 World's Fair, its architects faced a problem the visitors would never think about: the ground was soft and waterlogged. Their answer was to sink thousands of oak piles deep into it, a submerged forest that has held the great glass roof steady for more than a century. People photograph the dome. Almost nobody thinks about the timber under the water.
The part you don't see is the part that holds
A facade is what gets admired. A foundation is what keeps the thing standing. They are not in competition, but they are not the same, and confusing one for the other is how buildings — and markets — fall down.
A carbon credit has a facade too: the certificate, the headline tonnage, the logo on the retirement page. And it has a foundation: the field records, the satellite passes, the community testimony, the chain of custody running back to a specific place and time. The facade is what gets traded. The foundation is what makes the trade honest.
What we build
Most of the carbon market's attention goes to the facade — the claim, the brand, the marketing of a tonne. We have chosen to work on the part nobody photographs: the unseen record beneath the credit, from the first GPS point in a mangrove to the moment a buyer decides to trust it.
It is less glamorous than a dome. But the oak under the Grand Palais is a fair reminder of where credibility actually comes from. The part you can see is only ever as good as the part you cannot.
See the foundation we build for every project — one verifiable record beneath every claim.